Senior Applied Scientist

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Microsoft Copilot is revolutionizing how people work and has created an unprecedented opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in a way that benefits millions of people. As a Senior Applied Scientist in Microsoft’s productivity division, your core mission will be to deliver exciting innovation in Microsoft Copilot. We are looking for candidates who are creative, self-driven, curious, people-oriented and comfortable defining a path through ambiguity towards high-level goals. The successful applicant(s) will collaborate closely with people across Microsoft’s product teams and Microsoft Research to see their ideas realized in products and services that are used worldwide, as well as to contribute back to the scientific community and beyond (e.g. via presentations, publications, media interviews, and similar).

Microsoft’s mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. As employees we come together with a growth mindset, innovate to empower others, and collaborate to realize our shared goals. Each day we build on our values of respect, integrity, and accountability to create a culture of inclusion where everyone can thrive at work and beyond.

Required Qualifications:

• Bachelor's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 4+ years related experience (e.g., statistics predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Master's Degree in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 3+ years related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR Doctorate in Statistics, Econometrics, Computer Science, Electrical or Computer Engineering, or related field AND 1+ year(s) related experience (e.g., statistics, predictive analytics, research)
  • OR equivalent experience.
• A record of publication in top-tier scientific venues (ongoing or in the recent past) (e.g., NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, KDD, WWW, CHI, PNAS, Nature).
• Experience coding and hands-on experience working with foundation models.
• Experience applying research, preferring the large-scale application of new ideas over theory and prototypes.
• Demonstrated collaboration and communication skills, both within-team and cross-team, and experience working through problems in ambiguous environments adapting to new research challenges as technology develops.

Other Requirements

• As a part of your application please attach your CV and the names and contact information of at least three established researchers familiar with your research who will be willing to write a letter of reference. One of these people should be your Ph.D. advisor.
• (Optional) A cover letter discussing your interest in the role and how your experience connects with the topics in this call.
• (Optional) A brief academic statement that outlines both your research achievements and agenda and up to two papers that highlight your research interests.

Candidates must be able to meet Microsoft, customer and/or government security screening requirements that are required for this role. These requirements include, but are not limited to the following specialized security screenings:

• Microsoft Cloud Background Check: This position will be required to pass the Microsoft Cloud Background Check upon hire/transfer and every two years thereafter.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience working on successful applied research projects in industry environments
• Record of publication specifically on applications of language models or very closely related areas
• An applicant with the following skills would be a plus:
  • Applications of Foundation Models
  • Domain Adaptation of Foundation Models (e.g. fine-tuning LLMs/SLMs)
  • Vision, Audio, and Multimodal Foundation Models
  • On-device Foundation Models
  • Trust, Privacy, and Foundation Models
  • Agentic Systems
  • Prompt Tuning
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Applied Machine Learning
  • Data Mining with Language Models
  • Human-AI Interaction
  • Computational Social Science

Applied Sciences IC4 - The typical base pay range for this role across the U.S. is USD $117,200 - $229,200 per year. There is a different range applicable to specific work locations, within the San Francisco Bay area and New York City metropolitan area, and the base pay range for this role in those locations is USD $153,600 - $250,200 per year.

Certain roles may be eligible for benefits and other compensation. Find additional benefits and pay information here: https://careers.microsoft.com/us/en/us-corporate-pay


Microsoft will accept applications and processes offers for these roles on an ongoing basis.

• Defining, leading, and helping to conduct research projects that simultaneously advance the state-of-the-art and directly benefit Microsoft’s core productivity products.
• Collaborating and coordinating with people in a range of roles, including researchers, engineers, product managers, designers, and other key product stakeholders. Serving as a bridge between research and product.
• Teaching, guiding, and tutoring colleagues without research backgrounds in state-of-the-art techniques and research best practices.
• Many of the things you will try should lead to unexpected outcomes. You must be comfortable learning from experience, developing new hypotheses, and iterating.
• Sharing your research with others via a range of means, including publication, to enable others to build on your work and to contribute to the understanding of our products as cutting-edge and science driven.
• Effectively communicating with product leaders (and often MSR researchers) throughout the planning and execution of applied research projects, which often involves learning and teaching complex concepts.